THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI (1919)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

As long as I’ve been reading film criticism, I’ve been exposed to the prevalent notion that Robert Weine’s CABIINET OF DR. CALIGARI was primarily a political allegory about the state of authority in Weimar Germany. Had I never encountered the idea before, though, the Kino restoration of CALIGARI provides a commentary that cites all the basic propositions: that the titular doctor represents the same corrupt authority that would later turn one of Europe’s most cultured countries into a nation of Nai fanatics.

I would not question that sociological factors in Weimar culture had a tremendous effect upon CALIGARI’s genesis, to say nothing of wider European artistic trends like the cubist and futurist movements that ostensibly influence on the film’s unique set-design. Yet I don’t think CALIGARI lends itself to a strict allegorical interpretation. First and foremost, CALIGARI is one of the world’s first major horror-films, which means that it would’ve derived most of its horror-tropes not from other films, but from the horror genre as it existed at that time: mostly (a) recordings of folkloric horror-tales or (b) original prose works. I’ve never encountered any ruminations by either director Weine or scripters Mayer and Janowicz about CALIGARI’s origins. But since all of them were educated Europeans, I think it’s likely that one or more of them were familiar with the works that I think could have influenced that genesis—two major works published one year apart, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” (1817) and Mary Shelley’s novel FRANKENSTEIN (1818).

Of the two, “The Sandman” bears the greater structural resemblance to Weine’s film. Both narratives, when seen in the entirety, concern the dooms of earnest young men who are undone by strange older men who control forces outside the realm of nature. In both narratives there’s initially a distancing factor. The doom of Hoffmann’s young man Nathaniel is related not by him but by a friend chronicling Nathaniel’s misfortunes via letters, while in Weine, young Francis lays out his own story to a listener, and the bulk of the film is told within this frame, before coming back to present-time Francis for a “twist ending.” In “Sandman,” Nathaniel meets his bizarre antagonist twice in his life, first when Nathaniel is a child, and then when he’s a young man on the cusp of marriage. Francis meets Caligari only once, when he Francis is seeking to make a young local woman his bride. Nathaniel’s antagonist assumes two somewhat separate identities, that of “Coppelius” and Coppola,” and only in the latter identity does he have access to a mysterious young woman, later proved to be an automaton. Francis encounters Caligari just once, when the doctor travels in the guise of a carnival mountebank, attended by a somnambulist whom the doctor controls like a robot. To be sure, within the context of the internal tale, the Caligari of 1919 also has a “double identity” of sorts, in that he’s based his nefarious deeds on those of a magus of the same name from the late 18^th century. In “Sandman,” Nathaniel is so love-stricken by Coppola’s female companion Olympia that he throws over his real fiancée, and when he finds out how he’s been deceived, he kills himself. Throughout the internal story of CALIGARI, Francis seems to have triumphed, in that he exposes Caligari’s crimes and uncovers his identity as the manager of an insane asylum. However, when the frame-story finishes up, it’s revealed that Francis is actually insane himself, and has been telling his story to another occupant of the asylum where they both reside. Moreover, in the final “gotcha,” the head doctor of the institution is a real-world version of Caligari, and all of Francis’s delusions have been projections of evil upon a devoted healer who’s trying to help his patients.

One anecdote asserts that the original plan of the film’s producers was to tell the story “straight,” without the frame-story and its (rather modest) concessions to rationality. This may well be true, but had the frame-tale been omitted, the resulting film would in some ways bear a greater resemblance to Hoffmann’s story, in which Caligari and his somnambulistic servant existed, with all their bizarre aspects, within the real world. Unlike Nathaniel, Francis presumably would have triumphed over his antagonist, though said triumph would have been muted by his having lost his best friend to a fiend. So it’s not impossible that “the Sandman” was the structural model for the internal story, and that the quasi-rational frame-tale was injected to give the viewer some of the same sense of desolation that Hoffmann’s tale gave to its readers.

The influence of Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, if valid, would be confined entirely to the internal tale. Many commentaries have emphasized the influence of Weine’s Cesare upon later versions of the Frankenstein Monster, courtesy of James Whale’s cinematic borrowings. But the Monster of Shelley’s prose is not a lumbering engine of destruction. Rather, Shelley’s Monster has roots in Germanic stories about doppelgangers, some of whom are known for doing all the nasty things that their real-world originals would never do. The doppelganger template only roughly fits Shelley’s narrative, but at the very least the hideous Monster does on occasion murder people whose knowledge might be a threat to Victor Frankenstein.

Within the internal tale of CALIGARI, the viewer is told that Caligari has traveled to other cities before that of Francis, and that the mad doctor has used Cesare to murder other helpless victims. However, within the internal story, the viewer only witnesses two victims of Cesare's violence, both of whom have strong ties to Francis. It’s first established that Francis and Alan are best friends despite the fact that both of them are courting Jane. Then, when the two young men visit Caligari’s show, the doctor claims that Cesare possesses prophetic powers due to being in a continual state of sleep. Alan asks “How long will I live,” and Cesare predicts that he won’t live past that night. Then, for no particular reason, Caligari makes the prophecy come true by sending Cesare to Alan’s apartment, where the somnambulist knifes Alan to death. At no time does Francis realize that his best friend’s death leaves his way to Jane clear-- though he has another opponent of sorts. For equally obscure reasons, Caligari sends Cesare to kill Jane as well—but in a justly famous scene, Cesare more or less “wakes up” and tries to make Jane his own. The police, egged on by Francis, overtake Cesare before Jane is violated. The sleepwalker simply dies during the pursuit, and later Francis is able to expose Caligari’s true identity within the internal tale. But the salient point is that though Caligari has no real motives and thus does not sustain a doppelganger relationship with the mad doctor, everything the viewer sees Cesare do can be seen as a manifestation of Francis’s evil nature.

Given my view that CALIGARI is more strongly inspired by other horror-texts than by Weimar social forces, I find it further validation in the script’s few details about “the first Caligari.” Rather than imagining that the modern Caligari takes his model from some character out of preliterate folklore, “Original Caligari” is said to have appeared—complete with somnambulistic slave—in 1783. By my reckoning, this falls within the time-period when the rationality of the eighteenth century met its literary nemesis in the flowering of the Gothic story from 1760 to about 1796. The first phase of the Gothic gave way to the more generalized form of the prose horror story, ranging from the works of Hoffmann and Shelley to the equally consequential accomplishments of LeFanu, Stevenson, Stoker and many others. Modern-day Caligari’s horrific nature lies not in his vague emulation of the ways of tyrannical authority, but in his challenge to the forces of modernity in the dawning twentieth century. He appeals to the fear that, even with the supposed explanations of rational psychology, the worlds of the irrational yet endure.